Various assemblies have been created to store and dispense products, particularly in a retail sales environment. Gravity-fed dispensers are one type of dispensing assembly commonly used in retail outlets such as grocery stores, convenience marts and department stores. Gravity-fed dispensers work by loading products, such as canned products, on their sides at the top of a path having a declining slope and storing the cans along the path. The bottommost portion of the path has a dispensing region, usually forward facing, where a product is easily accessible to the customers. When the customer removes the product from the dispensing region, gravity forces the adjacent product farther down the path and into the dispensing region. Gravity-fed dispensers allow products to be stored and dispensed in a convenient and efficient manner.
One example of a gravity-fed dispenser is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,991,116 to Johnson. The Johnson device features a set of panels having curvilinear rails which define a plurality of downward-sloping paths oriented vertically to each other. A product travels down a path and is dispensed in a dispensing region on a forward facing portion of the unit.
In the Johnson device, the rails are configured so that the paths are separated from the other paths throughout the dispenser. Therefore, a product placed on one path remains on the path from the topmost loading portion of the path to the bottommost dispensing portion of the path.
A disadvantage of the prior art devices is that products that are positioned on different paths within the dispensing unit never get mixed. While prior art devices may be adapted to provide several products in the dispensing region, customers normally favor taking the product from one path. For instance, frequently the most forward facing product or the product on the bottom path are preferred to other accessible products. Accordingly, a disproportionate number of products are taken from one path. This prevents uniform distribution of the product inventory; the products on the other path tend to remain, while the products on the bottom path are restocked and thus are fresher. Due to the uneven distribution of product by such a dispensing unit, a store owner may have to dispose of older product and incur the costs associated therewith. Additionally, such dispensing units have to be checked and refilled frequently because one track is often emptied before all the products in the dispensing unit have been removed.
Gravity-fed dispensers known in the art generally have sidewalls displaced apart from each other at a fixed length. Therefore, the width of the paths defined by ledges on the sidewalls are fixed and can only accommodate products with a corresponding width. Therefore, with traditional gravity-fed dispensers, a store owner must purchase numerous units to accommodate products with different sizes and certain dispensers may become obsolete when a manufacturer changes the dimensions of a product packaging. Accordingly, it is desirable for the distance between sidewalls to be adjustable.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a gravity-fed storage and dispensing unit that provides multiple product dispensing paths and mixes products from each path together.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a gravity-fed storage and dispensing unit that distributes products uniformly.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a gravity-fed storage and dispensing unit having the aforesaid characteristics that is adjustable with respect to the distance between the sidewalls and the width of the paths for the product.
Still a further object of the present invention is to provide a gravity-fed storage and dispensing unit that can be assembled to add a plurality of additional gravity-fed storage and dispensing units in an adjacent relationship to each other.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a gravity-fed storage and dispensing unit that is efficient and cost effective to manufacture.